Promoting online is easy when people actually want your product
The company website is one of the stops on the path for a more intricate introduction between a consumer and a brand. The consumer already has an idea of what it believes the brand is all about. The website is there to help push them along towards a positive relationship with the brand.
A lot of pressure is put on the web strategist to capture leads and produce sales online. It’s important to remember that if your brand, product and marketing materials are solid the web sales and leads will follow. If you aren’t having success with generating sales of your product maybe check the brand or product’s image that it’s giving off.
A website is like an online sales person, it can’t sell the product if the consumer’s opinion is negative of the brand or its product. Websites can’t sell a product to people who don’t want it. Companies still have to innovate when it comes to their products – produce something that people want.
You can be the first to market and put up online marketing materials throughout the online universe but it doesn’t matter if no one is looking for it. Being listed in a search engine is useless if no one cares to use it to find your product. In corporate America the thinking is a little backwards at times. It’s so much easier to generate social media “likes” and “share” on a product that people want. You don’t have to trick them into sharing they will do it naturally. People always want to tell other people about something they purchased or are proud of.
I took the corporate fan page from 0 to nearly 7,000 fans as of today
It’s true the un-song hero who sits in his cubicle listening to R&B and motivational speaking all day has done something amazing.
I can remember clearly the days when no one within the company believed that we could be successful on Facebook. After creating a couple of graphic representations and pitching the concept to my boss who took it to the director and then to the vice president of communications a fan page was born. That’s the life on a corporate battle field, many obstacles and chances for other people to kill something that you want to do. It only takes one person to not understand your vision and a good idea is gone forever. This fan page is a reflection of how I feel about the company that I’ve worked at for 11 years. I love its products and so does many people around the world.
If you are a web strategist and you want to start a fan page or you are trying to improve a fan page my advice is to ride your brand. You don’t have to sell your product; talk about the good things that it does or show it in action through pictures. Everything we do on the web is tied to an emotion. From the simplest things such as buying a book there has to be some type of emotion there.
It’s easy to build fan pages and create a following if you have the right brand. Don’t waste your time on all of the webinars on how to build a fan page. The most important thing is to build a strategy and adjust the strategy as needed. Once you have the strategy find the write people to be part of your team. I worked with some very talented people some who are still with the company and some who have moved on. These individuals were very good writers and a lot of the success we had was because of their skills. These people helped me put the finishing touches on a vision that I had.
As an encore the Twitter page has almost 10,000 followers. I can remember when the Twitter page had to get approval from the CEO.
Communicate… Communicate… If you do this well you will have success on social media platforms.
Culture
The culture defines the company and reflects on the website to the outside world. The power of the culture can over take web principles and replace it with corporate beliefs. The way the company thinks internally tries to over power the communication to the outside world. The company tries to force the way it belief system to the people using the web. People within the organization never stop to understand that maybe people on the outside don’t think the way the company does. The internal words that are being used don’t carry over to the outside world.
Those darn processes
Processes are the weights that drag down the speed in a corporation. Sometimes you can’t react when you need to because you don’t have the right approvals or signatures. You want to make a change to web page content you have to go through the appropriate channels. Someone has to write the content someone proof reads it and then someone proof reads it again. By the time the content gets out there its old news.
This is the reality of a web professional in the corporate world. At what point do you give the authority to web professionals to write, proof read and deliver their own content? You could easily argue that web professional don’t have the skill set of marketing or communications. Maybe these are the new traits of the next generation web professional.
Web professionals were always thought to be people who sit in a corner and develop code without interacting with other people. In the early years of the web this would be true because no one truly understood how to write HTML, JavaScript, or Java except people who were in computer science fields. As time progressed there was a need for someone to interact between the geek and the not so geeky professional. Corporations came up with the general term “business analyst” for this person.
There’s a need for a new type of professional who can take the business goals and put them into the online communications plan to promote the correct branded message. This sounds like a no brainer but it’s more difficult than you think and that’s how processes get created. The corporate world tries to lump online communication into printed advertising. You always see corporate websites with catchy slogans, pretty visual images but with no true call to action. That’s a reflection of the person behind the advertising not having the web expertise. This same professional also will make a printed ad that only links to the www.domain.com name without any back end tracking. They assume that if someone decides to go to the website they must be interested in purchasing the product. That’s not always the case especially if your company doesn’t directly participate in a retail platform. Depending on the nature of your business these web visitors could be students doing research, or someone looking for a job. Not everyone is a purchasing consumer.
The next time you see a process consider why it was made. Most likely it’s to keep the non-knowledgeable employee from embarrassing them self and the company. While it works perfectly for that purpose it slows down the employee who has the business knowledge and expertise to perform at a level to help drive the company to reach its goals.
Writing Press Releases for Search Engines
Even though this video is specifically about how to write press releases there were a couple of things I wanted to point out from my own experience. I completely agree that using the corporate jargon out on the web is a problem. I’ve been in multiple meetings with people wanting to know why certain pages don’t come up in web searches. I give them the exact same reasoning that was mentioned in this video – “People don’t talk like corporations”. I get so tired of saying it that I sound like a broken record but it was good to hear someone else say it on this video.
The thing I have to disagree with is the linking in a press release. It seems like the obvious thing to do is put in links but I’ve noticed that most people who use the release take out the links when they post it to their site or blog. I would assume they do it because they really don’t want the person reading the information to leave their site. The only time that I’ve seen the links on the page is if the person who used the release links straight to the brand name. I would waste a lot of valuable time putting links in the release when we talked about a specific product. I figured it would be good to take readers directly to the product just in case they wanted to learn more. After doing a quick glance on the internet of sites using the releases I noticed all of the links I put in were stripped out. So before you go in and start putting all of those links in do some testing of your own.
Thought for Thursday
Do one thing today to make the web experience better for your consumer. Take the time to understand what your consumer may be trying to do on your website and help them complete the task easier. Forget about the stats you have to report out at this weeks meeting and actually do something to help your customer. Get out of the normal day to day functions of doing a task just to say you did it. Do your web job because you love it and it’s the right thing to do.
Communications Policies Are A Must
If the company you work for is fairly large it’s very important to have a communication policy. These policies are important because it helps to define who can talk on behalf of the company. You don’t want to get into a situation where an employee is discussing the company and they appear to be speaking on behalf of the company and they shouldn’t be. This could cause legal problems for both the employee and the company.
Another item is to make it clear who can put out documents on behalf of the company. Everyone thinks they are a good writer but truly there are individuals who shouldn’t be writing documents that will be given to the general public.
Any type of communication to the public is a reflection of the brand. All individuals who will be interacting with an external audience need to be trained in the basics of communication. You don’t want the worst speller in the company writing company announcements or press releases. It only takes one bad communication to taint the image that took years to build.
You don’t want to wait until an issue pops up to create this policy. Don’t make it over complicated when you write the policy. It should be really simple to understand when a person reads it. The most important thing is to make sure the policy is easy to find.
Now to a little bit of the techie stuff. Once a document is out on the web and a search engine indexes it there’s a big problem. So if you have an employee giving false information on a blog the search engine will have it in its internal database and it will show if it’s matched by the right search criteria. Yes, the post can be deleted but most likely the damage has already been done because a lot of people have seen it already. The same goes for documents, once the search engine indexes it the only thing to do is delete the document and hope no one made a copy or saved it to their computer.
Is social media old news?
I get an email from my LinkedIn groups once per day. Most of the time I simply glance at the email without completely opening it. There always seems to be the same conversations repeating themselves. One will be about “What’s the best certification?” and another will ask about the best SEO or analytics techniques. After so many times of seeing the same stuff I really don’t get on these platforms much anymore.
Facebook has been over taken by kids all over the world like Myspace.
Where is social media headed?
Where is the web headed in general?
It’s a symphony only with the right orchestra
Sometimes it’s the simple things that makes things great. Websites are so simple because the people behind them are brilliant. If a website makes you forget about the techie stuff behind it and lets you be in the moment to enjoy its functionality it’s great.
Who cares about the HTML that makes the page? The user cares about the experience that it gives.
Who cares that you can play a 2gig video file? The user only cares if he/she was touched by the message.
Who cares about SEO? The user only cares if they can type “www.your_brand_here.com”
Who cares if you don’t hire the right people to run your website strategy? Ask the consumer who can’t do any of the previous mentioned.
Web thoughts for today
There are many ways to build a website and many colors to use. At what point do you stop focusing on the design? Maybe you never stop designing? I grow more and more confused daily with this question. I guess it still comes down to what’s the purpose of the website to begin with.
